As PrettyLittleThing founder and chief executive Umar Kamani is inducted into the Drapers Digital Awards Hall of Fame, he talks to Drapers about creating a legacy and taking the rapidly growing business global.

Drapers Footwear Awards 19 will recognise and celebrate the footwear's very best from across the UK and Ireland.

We have 18 exciting categories up for contest, including International Footwear Business of the Year and Best Sustainable Initiative of the Year.

As PrettyLittleThing founder and chief executive Umar Kamani is inducted into the Drapers Digital Awards Hall of Fame, he talks to Drapers about creating a legacy and taking the rapidly growing business global.

Using social media to your advantage

Suzie Empson - Commercial director at premium menswear brand Farrell

I particularly like the Warehouse ‘Style Me If You Can’ (www.warehouse.co.uk/style-me-if-you-can) campaign, as it’s easy and fun to do and directly engages the target customer with the product.

It puts the consumer in the driving seat as the stylist. It enables them to pull together outfits and look for different scenarios and locations. The ‘Style Me If You Can’ hub has an integrated social media platform that allows users to comment on and share styled outfits.

The looks with the most likes will then make it into Warehouse’s autumn 13 campaign while other top-ranking looks can win Warehouse vouchers and trips to fashion capitals.

Martin Newman - Chief executive of ecommerce consultancy Practicology

I particularly liked the Burberry ‘Body Fragrance’ campaign (www.facebook.com/pages/Burberry-Body/172621259501331?fref=ts) a couple of years ago. It recognises that the best marketing strategy on social media is a ‘pull strategy’ where you add value to your existing customers and their friends, resulting in them talking about and sharing your proposition, as opposed to a ‘push strategy’, where the brand invades the customers’ social space with untimely or irrelevant offers.

Its approach was to say to existing fans, “Give us your name and address and we’ll send you a free sample of our new fragrance”. This one move increased its customer database by 250,000 in two weeks while also driving sales.

Burberry also had tremendous early success with its ‘Art of the Trench’ campaign in 2009 (Artofthetrench.com), which allowed users to upload their photo in a Burberry trench coat. Since launching the Art of the Trench, it has had more than 20.2 million page views.

Jonathan Hudson - Social and mobile lead at home shopping group Shop Direct

The [men’s toiletries brand] Old Spice personalised video campaign was utterly brilliant. Heading towards46 million views on YouTube, it showed how you can use great content and a sense of humour to breathe new life into an old brand.

From an internal perspective, we’re probably most proud of ‘Littlewoods LIVE’, Littlewoods’ ground-breaking Facebook TV show (www.facebook.com/littlewoods/app_434785129913948). It’s not only helped Littlewoods gain tens of thousands of new Facebook fans but also consistently demonstrates tangible sales benefits.

Jennifer Roebuck - Multichannel marketing director at young fashion business French Connection

Despite the controversy around the ‘Share a Coke’ Coca-Cola campaign (www.coca-cola.co.uk/faq/products/share-a-coke.html) due to the limited selection of names available in each country, the attempt to personalise a mass-produced beverage like Coke and then join up all of the communication and retail channels is impressive.

Retailers are all trying to achieve the holy grail of one customer view, 360-degree communications andmultichannel experiences, but no one has made an impact like this in fashion.

The campaign has generated a projected rise in reach of 3% on Twitter UK and 5% on Facebook UK, which is significant when you look at its reach of 51% and 40% respectively. The sales impact hasn’t been revealed yet, but in its test markets Coke claims sales rose.

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